Michael Lo

This is Michael Lo's website. I am a human who cares about humans.

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  Will I get a software engineering job within 3 months?

  
  May 28, 2024
  

  You can also see this question on Manifold. Resolves YES if I receive an offer for a full-time job doing software engineering, ML engineering, and/or research engineering by September 1, 2024. Resolves NO if I do not receive an offer for a full-time job doing software engineering, ML engineering, and/or research engineering by September 1, 2024.

  My plan for the next 3 months

  Edit (2024/08/27): I resolved the Manifold question as NO and provided more information in a comment here. In summary, I’ve been struggling with mental health issues like grief, depression, anxiety, and ADHD. These issues in tandem with the pressure of searching for jobs caused me to burnout. I am currently doing weekly sessions of therapy to understand and work through these obstacles.

  Edit (2024/05/30): Based on feedback from my question on Manifold, I am updating my plan to be less ambitious and less broad. This means focusing on only a few projects and some simple contributions to well-known projects. Projects and contributions will be more “systems” flavored instead of “algorithms” flavored, focusing on GPU programming, model optimization, and MLOps. I will start networking now, start applying in 2 weeks, and start interviewing whenever I get interviews. Interview preparation will start now and continue for 3 months.

  Here is my rough plan. Max out connection requests on LinkedIn every week and apply to 20-30 jobs every day. Make open source contributions to projects like PyTorch AO, OpenAI Triton, PyTorch XLA. Build personal projects in GPU kernel benchmarking, model quantization and pruning, and parallelized training. Prepare for software engineering interviews using Leetcode, Grokking, EPI, and mock assessments. Skim system design interview preparation since it is not necessary for new grad/entry-level roles.

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  Experimenting with SRS

  
  May 1, 2024
  

  Compiling and organizing resources on spaced repetition systems, specifically Anki.

  Andy Matuschak studies quantum mechanics with Dwarkesh Patel and explains how to write good prompts.

  Michael Nielsen writes on augmenting long-term memory and on using spaced repetition systems to see through a piece of mathematics.

  Callum McDougall details his personal use of SRS in How I use Anki: expanding the scope of SRS.

  Eric ‘Siggy’ Scott (u/SigmaX) goes over his method for learning statistics and advanced machine learning concepts using Anki.

  Alex Turner (TurnTrout) walks through some lessons learned from self-teaching.

  Gwern covers a lot of the research on spaced repetition.

  Piotr Wozniak’s Effective learning: Twenty rules of formulating knowledge are often recommended.